Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author.While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server.

All students are required to complete the assignments. Homework will be submitted at the beginning of class on the due date.

If circumstances beyond the student’s control arise and an assignment cannot be submitted on the due date, an instructor should be contacted prior to the due date. With an instructor’s permission, late homework may be accepted within one week of the due date.

All decisions will be made on an individual student basis and the final decision rests with the instructor assigning the homework. A penalty of 10 percentage points will be applied to late homework.

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) is a repository for the 3-D structural data of large biological molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids. Most structures are determined by X-ray diffraction, but about 15% of structures are determined by NMR.

Large scale organized efforts by Structural Genomics Initiative and International Structural Genomics Consortium have greatly accelerated the pace of growth.

“The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. It’s a revolution. We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

-------- By Steve Lohr, “The Age of Big data”, The New York Times, 2012.

In business, big data can help to identify unknown needs, customize advertisement, monitor and evaluate operation, which leads to big profit and big saving. In science, big data is a huge resource for a lot of scientific discoveries.

Oxford Nanopore, long the sleeper project to watch in the field of mapping DNA, just announced two products that could dramatically change the field of DNA sequencing: a new DNA sequencer that may be able to handle a human genome in 15 minutes, and a USB thumb drive DNA sequencer that can read DNA directly from blood with no prep work.

“‘Game changer’ is an understatement,” says George Church of Harvard University. (Church was one of the inventors on one of the patents licensed to Oxford Nanopore that led to the device.” He ticks off the devices specs: Tiny instruments for $900. Able to read DNA in 10,000-letter stretches — compared to a couple hundred for current technologies. Able to sequence a human genome in fifteen minutes (although you’d need 20 of the server-size devices coming in 2013, not just the USB stick.)

There have been a large series of breakthroughs in micro-electronics and nano-electronics that have produced instruments that quantify and/or characterize large number of biological molecules in parallel using very small mount of biomaterial.

Such technical advances have made possible to comprehensively characterize and quantify the building blocks (DNA, RNA, protein) in a biological system.